AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 16 Asteroids, Planets and Planetary Satellites
Poster, Monday, January 5, 2004, 9:20am-6:30pm, Grand Hall

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[16.04] Reconstructing HST Images of Asteroids

A.D. Storrs, S. Bank, H. Gerhardt (Towson Univ.), K. Makhoul (MIT)

We present reconstructions of images of 22 large main belt asteroids that were observed by Hubble Space Telescope with the Wide-Field/Planetary cameras. All images were restored with the MISTRAL program (Mugnier, Fusco, and Conan 2003) at enhanced spatial resolution. This is possible thanks to the well-studied and stable point spread function (PSF) on HST. We present some modeling of this process and determine that the Strehl ratio for WF/PC (aberrated) images can be improved to 130 ratio of 80

We will report sizes, shapes, and albedos for these objects, as well as any surface features. Images taken with the WFPC-2 instrument were made in a variety of filters so that it should be possible to investigate changes in mineralogy across the surface of the larger asteroids in a manner similar to that done on 4 Vesta by Binzel et al. (1997). Of particular interest are a possible water of hydration feature on 1 Ceres, and the non-observation of a constriction or gap between the components of 216 Kleopatra.

Reduction of this data was aided by grant HST-GO-08583.08A from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

References:

Mugnier, L.M., T. Fusco, and J.-M. Conan, 2003. JOSA A (submitted)

Binzel, R.P., Gaffey, M.J., Thomas, P.C., Zellner, B.H., Storrs, A.D., and Wells, E.N. 1997. Icarus 128 pp. 95-103


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: astorrs@towson.edu

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.